Alan Cooper, Robert Reinmann, David Cronin - About Face 3- The Essentials of Interaction Design (pdf) Read online

  557

  Localization and Globalization

  558

  Galleries and Templates

  559

  Help

  560

  The index

  560

  Shortcuts and overview

  561

  Not for beginners

  561

  Modeless and interactive help

  561

  Wizards

  561

  “Intelligent” agents

  562

  Afterword: On Collaboration

  565

  Appendix A Design Principles

  569

  Appendix B Bibliography

  575

  Index

  581

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  Foreword: The Postindustrial

  World

  The industrial age is over. Manufacturing, the primary economic driver of the past 175 years, no longer dominates. While manufacturing is bigger than ever, it has lost its leadership to digital technology, and software now dominates our economy. We have moved from atoms to bits. We are now in the postindustrial age.

  More and more products have software in them. My stove has a microchip in it to manage the lights, fan, and oven temperature. When the deliveryman has me sign for a package, it’s on a computer, not a pad of paper. When I shop for a car, I am really shopping for a navigation system.

  More and more businesses are utterly dependent on software, and not just the obvious ones like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Thousands of companies of all sizes that provide products and services across the spectrum of commerce use software in every facet of their operations, management, planning, and sales. The back-office systems that run big companies are all software systems. Hiring and human resource management, investment and arbitrage, purchasing and supply chain management, point-of-sale, operations, and decision support are all pure software systems these days. And the Web dominates all sales and marketing. Live humans are no longer the front line of businesses. Software plays that role instead. Vendors, customers, colleagues, and employees all communicate with companies via software or software-mediated paths.

  The organizational structures and management techniques that have worked so well in the past for manufacturing-based companies are failing us today in the postindustrial age. They fail because they focus on the transformation and movement of things made out of atoms. There are only finite amounts of desirable atoms and it takes lots of energy to transform and transport them. Software—made out of bits, not atoms—is qualitatively different. There is an infinite quantity of bits and virtually no energy is needed to transform, transport, or even replicate them.

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  The people who make software are different as well. The average computer programmer and the average assembly line worker are qualitatively different in their aptitude, attitude, training, language, tools, and value systems. The most effective ways of supervising, tracking, and managing programmers are dramatically different from those used so successfully with blue-collar workers of an earlier age. Getting programmers to do what is best for the company requires skills unknown to the industrial-age executive.

  Reducing the cost of manufacturing was the essential contribution of industrialization. Thus the best and brightest minds of an earlier age applied themselves to reducing the amount of money spent creating products. In the postindustrial age, the costs of raw materials, product assembly, and shipping are equally low for all players. The only significant leverage to lower manufacturing costs comes through automation, planning, and business intelligence: that is, software. In other words, instead of saving a dollar on the construction of each widget, you save a million dollars by making the precisely needed quantity of the most desirable product.

  Once a software program has been successfully written, it can be reproduced an unlimited number of times for virtually nothing. There is little benefit in reducing the cost of writing it. Reducing the amount one spends on software construction usually means compromising the quality, so the primary business equation of the industrial age is reversed today. The best and brightest minds of today apply themselves to increasing the effectiveness of software and the quality of its behavior.

  Keep in mind that all modern financial accounting systems focus on tracking manufacturing costs and no longer accurately represent the state of our software-dominated businesses. Making executive decisions on these erroneous numbers causes significant waste of time, money, and opportunity.

  It’s no wonder that companies struggle with software. Very capable executives find that their intentions are subtly but significantly altered somewhere along the path from conception to release. What appeared to be a sound plan turns out to be inadequate for shepherding the software construction process. It’s time to let go of obsolete industrial-age management methods and adopt interaction design as the primary tool for designing and managing software construction.

  Since About Face was first published in 1995, the practice of interaction design has grown and matured enormously. Dominated for so long by simple ex post facto, trial-and-error methods, interaction design—along with its many siblings and variants—has matured into a clear, dependable, effective tool for determining what behavior will succeed. The invention and development of personas, the refinement of written behavioral blueprints, and the entire practice of Goal-Directed™ Design, have made high-quality software behavior achievable by any organization with the will to create it.

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  What’s more, interaction design has emerged as an incredibly powerful software construction management tool. Because it is a description of the software as it will be when it is finally written, it acts as a blueprint, not only helping programmers know what to build but also helping managers measure the progress of the programmers.

  Interaction design has also shown its power as a marketing tool, communicating with great clarity and specificity about exactly whom will be using the product and why. Getting to the root of customer motivations is manna for marketers, and the qualitative research and analysis aspects of Goal-Directed Design provide significant market insight.

  Especially since the Web revolution—when tossing common sense overboard seemed to be the path to instant riches—I’ve heard many intelligent people who really should know better say, “It is simply not possible to know what the user wants!” While this assertion certainly absolves them of not, in fact, knowing what the user wants, it is boldly, obviously, incredibly false. At my company, Cooper, clients bring our designers into the complex worlds of finance, health care, phar-maceuticals, human resources, programming tools, museums, consumer credit, and any number of disparate fields. Our teams, none of whom have any training in—or typically even any exposure to—the particular subject matter at hand, routinely become sufficiently expert in only a few weeks to astonish our clients. We can do this because our point of departure is relentlessly human-centered, rather than technology-centered.

  Interaction design is a tool for “Knowing what the user wants.” Armed with that knowledge, you can create better, more successful, bit-empowered products, and you can sell them for more money. What’s more, you will reach your market with a loyalty-inducing, better solution. Time and time again we have seen feature-loaded products early to market get trounced by later entries whose behavior has been better thought out. Imagine getting that thinking done before the first release ever has a chance to commit you to a nonoptimal strategy.

  Nothing succeeds like success, and the success of the practical application of the principles and methods put forth in this book—and others like it—are clearly demonstrating that software isn’t really as soft as many people first thought,
and that thorough user research and detailed planning are more necessary than ever in the postindustrial age.

  If you are committed to improving the world by improving the behavior of digital products and services, then I welcome you to the world of About Face.

  — Alan Cooper

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  Acknowledgments

  We’d like to express our deepest gratitude to the following individuals, without whom this new edition of About Face would not have been possible: Chris Webb at Wiley, who saw the time was right for a new edition; Sue Cooper, who shared that vision; and Sara Shlaer at Wiley, who has patiently helped us shape multiple editions of this book.

  We would also like to thank the following colleagues and Cooper designers for their contributions to this volume and the previous, for which we are greatly indebted: Kim Goodwin, who has contributed significantly to the development and expression of the concepts and methods described in these pages; Rebecca Bortman and Nick Myers who overhauled the book and cover designs, as well as the illustrations; Hugh Dubberly, for his help in developing the principles at the end of Chapter 8

  and for his assistance in clarifying the Goal-Directed process with early versions of the diagrams found in Chapter 1; Gretchen Anderson, Elaine Montgomery, and Doug LeMoine for their contributions on user and market research in Chapter 4; Rick Bond for his many insights about usability testing featured in Chapter 7; Ernest Kinsolving and Joerg Beringer at SAP for their contributions on the posture of Web portals in Chapter 9; Chris Weeldreyer for his insights into the design of embedded systems in Chapter 9; Wayne Greenwood for his contributions on control mapping in Chapter 10; and Nate Fortin and Nick Myers for their contributions on visual interface design and branding in Chapter 14. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Bacon, Steve Calde, John Dunning, David Fore, Nate Fortin, Kim Goodwin, Wayne Greenwood, Noah Guyot, Lane Halley, Ernest Kinsolving, Daniel Kuo, Berm Lee, Doug LeMoine, Tim McCoy, Elaine Montgomery, Nick Myers, Chris Noessel, Ryan Olshavsky, Angela Quail, Suzy Thompson, and Chris Weeldreyer for their contributions to the Cooper designs and illustrations featured in this volume.

  We are grateful to clients David West at Shared Healthcare Systems, Mike Kay and Bill Chang at Fujitsu Softek, John Chaffins at CrossCountry, Chris Twogood at Teradata, and Chris Dollar at McKesson for granting us permission to use examples

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  from the Cooper design projects featured in this book. We wish also to thank the many other clients who have had the vision and the foresight to work with us and support us in their organizations.

  We would also like to acknowledge the following authors and industry colleagues who have influenced or clarified our thinking over the years: Christopher Alexander, Edward Tufte, Kevin Mullet, Victor Papanek, Donald Norman, Larry Constantine, Challis Hodge, Shelley Evenson, Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, Stephen Pinker, and Terry Swack.

  Finally, it should be noted that the parts of Chapter 5 concerned with cognitive processing originally appeared in an article by Robert Reimann on UXMatters.com, and are used with permission.

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  Introduction to

  the Third Edition

  This book is about interaction design—the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Like many design disciplines, interaction design is concerned with form. However, first and foremost, interaction design focuses on something that traditional design disciplines do not often explore: the design of behavior.

  Most design affects human behavior: Architecture is concerned with how people use physical space, and graphic design often attempts to motivate or facilitate a response. But now, with the ubiquity of silicon-enabled products—from computers to cars and phones—we routinely create products that exhibit complex behavior.

  Take something as basic as an oven. Before the digital age, the operation of an oven was quite simple—it involved turning a single knob to the correct position. There was one position for off, and one position for any oven temperature one might want to use. Every single time a person turned that knob to a given position, the same thing happened. One might call this “behavior,” but it is certainly quite simple and mechanistic behavior. Compare this to our modern-day ovens with silicon chips and LCD screens. They are endowed with buttons that say non-cooking-related things like Start, Cancel, Program, as well as the more expected Bake and Broil. What happens when you press any one of these buttons is quite a lot less predictable than what happened when you turned the knob on your old gas range. In fact, the results of pressing one of the buttons is entirely dependent on the state of the oven and what other buttons you might have pressed previously. This is what we mean by complex behavior.

  This emergence of products with complex behavior has given rise to a new discipline. Interaction design borrows theory and technique from traditional design, usability, and engineering disciplines. But it is greater than a sum of its parts, with its own unique methods and practices. And to be clear—it is very much a design

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  discipline, quite different from science and engineering. While it should always be practiced in a rational and considered manner, interaction design is about synthesis and imagining things as they might be, not necessarily as they currently are.

  Interaction design is also an inherently humanistic enterprise. It is concerned most significantly with satisfying the needs and desires of the people who will interact with a product or service. In this book we describe a particular approach to interaction design that we call the Goal-Directed method. We’ve found that when a designer focuses on people’s goals—the reasons why they use a product in the first place—as well as their expectations, attitudes, and aptitudes, they can devise solutions that people find powerful and pleasurable.

  As even the most casual observer of developments in technology must have noticed, interactive products can become very complex very quickly. While a mechanical device may be capable of a dozen visible states, a digital product may be capable of being in thousands of different states (if not more!). This complexity can be a nightmare for users and designers alike. To tame this complexity, we rely on a very systematic and rational approach. This doesn’t mean that we don’t also value and encourage inventiveness and creativity. On the contrary, we find that a methodical approach helps us clearly identify opportunities for revolutionary thinking, and provides a way of assessing the effectiveness of our ideas.

  According to Gestalt Theory, people perceive a thing not as a set of individual features and attributes but as a unified whole in a relationship with its surroundings.

  As a result, it isn’t possible to effectively design an interactive product by decomposing it into a list of atomic requirements and coming up with a design solution for each. Even a relatively simple product must be considered in totality and in light of its context in the world. Again, we’ve found that a methodical approach helps provide the holistic perspective necessary to create products that people find useful and engaging.

  A Brief History of Interaction Design

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s a dedicated and visionary set of researchers, engineers, and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area were busy inventing how people would interact with computers in the future. At Xerox Parc, SRI, and eventually Apple Computer, people had begun discussing what it meant to create useful and usable “human interfaces” to digital products. In the mid-1980s, two industrial designers, Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank, who were working on the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, coined the term interaction design for what they were doing, but it would be another 10 years before other designers rediscovered this term and brought it into mainstream use.

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  At the time About Face was first published in August 1995, the landscape of interaction design was still a frontier wilderness. A small cadre of people brave enough to hold the title user interface designer operated under the shadow of software engineering, rather like the tiny, quick-witted mammals that scrambled under the shadows of hulking tyrannosaurs. “Software design,” as the first edition of About Face referred to it, was poorly understood and underappreciated, and, when it was practiced at all, it was usually practiced by programmers. A handful of uneasy technical writers, trainers, and product support people, along with a rising number of practitioners from another nascent field—usability—realized that something needed to change.

  The amazing growth and popularity of the Web drove that change, seemingly overnight. Suddenly, “ease of use” was a term on everyone’s lips. Traditional design professionals, who had dabbled in digital product design during the short-lived popularity of “multimedia” in the early nineties, leapt to the Web en masse. Seemingly new design titles sprang up like weeds: information designer, information architect, user experience strategist, and interaction designer. For the first time ever, C-level executive positions were established to focus on creating user-centered products and services, such as the chief experience officer. Universities scrambled to offer programs to train designers in these disciplines. Meanwhile, usability and human factors practitioners also rose in stature and are now recognized as advocates for better-designed products.

  Although the Web knocked interaction design idioms back by more than a decade, it inarguably placed user requirements on the radar of the corporate world for good. Since the second edition of About Face was published in 2003, the user experience of digital products has become front page news in the likes of Time magazine and BusinessWeek, and institutions such as Harvard Business School and Stanford have recognized the need to train the next generation of MBAs and technologists to incorporate design thinking into their business and development plans. People are tired of new technology for its own sake. Consumers are sending a clear message that what they want is good technology: technology that has been designed to provide a compelling and effective user experience.